Contest - Win free upcoming DVDs

While we work like madmen to get some artwork out to print, we are calling on your help.

Until Friday June 5th, 2009 we are running a contest with the prizes being one free copy of EACH of the following DVDs when they are released in stores:

- Mission Bloody Mary

- From the Orient with Fury

- Special Mission Lady Chaplin

- Tiffany Memorandum

- Fuller Report

What you have to do

We are looking for five summaries (one for each of these films) to be included on the back cover of the DVD.  Entries must be 250 - 300 words, be safe for store shelves (no vulgar language, et al.), and have to be in English.  Entries with correct spelling and grammar will receive more attention.  No duplicate entries, but you may submit as many new works as you desire.  Any submission must be YOUR works.

What to include

A bit about the plot, some selling points, recognition for cast and crew that were outstanding in this and other performances.  Pick up your DVD collection and read through some of the different synopsis to get further ideas.

Creativity counts major, so we leave it up to you.

Will you receive credit?

Absolutely.  When we have picked winners, we will contact them and ask for a "by line" to include below their summary.

When will the winners receive the DVDs?

They will receive it on (or as close as possible to) the street date for these films.  Since none of these films currently HAVE a street date, patience will be essential.  This is a way for all those who have purchased these films to get a chance to get the updated releases for free.  While we can't offer that to everyone, we can at least get you this close.

Any questions or anything I miss?

Drop us an email to the webmaster or leave a comment below.  Check out the submission form at http://www.doradofilms.com/eurospies-contest.php.

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Possibly found Eurospy negatives

We may have just stumbled on which lab has the negatives for Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.

The Parisian lab that we found the negative for 3 Musketeers of the West might actually have negatives for these two films as well.  We are trying to get them to give us a definite answer one way or another.  This will be great, because the only one in office who has experience working with 35mm splicing is Rick, and he has had a lot of family issues the last few months that have kept him on the road a lot.  Plus, going from the negative should be a higher quality final product.

These two films have been simmering on the backburner for so long, that we have been getting complaints.  There is a lot of worked involved in releasing films in the quality we strive for.  We could easily release a cut version, taken from a 3/4" cassette or 1" tape and spit it out in a week or two... but the quality would be terrible and we don't feel comfortable releasing that on our label.  We appreciate your patience and we know that you have been waiting for a while to get these films.  Trust us, we are not trying to delay it any further than we feel is necessary.  We have sunk much capital into these films and we are determined to release them.

Every DVD is a learning experience for us.  We try to take all we learn and apply it moving forward.  We want to make Fuller Report and Tiffany Memorandum a step forward, not the status quo or, much worse, a step back.

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A year of searching

Having spent over a year trying to track down the negatives, we have given up the pursuit and are resigning ourselves to restoring our prints.

Last February, I wrote about our prints for Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.  That was over a year ago now, and yet the situation is still the same.

After countless phone calls and emails, we are no further ahead for either of these films.  If any lab in Europe does have a print or negative for these films, we sure can't find them.

That doesn't mean we are giving up on the films, it just means we now have to work at restoring our prints.  Each film has several scenes cut from them for promotional material or some other purpose.  Records were not kept for WHY the scenes were removed from the print itself, but it is a moot point now anyway.

For both Special Mission Lady Chaplin and From The Orient With Fury, we restored the cut scenes digitally.  This is a fairly long process, as we then end up with about a second of audio missing where the scenes were put back in.  This is the result of how the audio track is arranged on a 35 mm print.  The audio is gone at this point.  Which means we then need to fill those gaps with our "best guess" from the rest of the soundtrack.  For music that is not too bad, as usually the songs are repeated throughout the movie.  It becomes substantially more difficult when the scene was cut during a conversation.  This is where the bulk of the time is taken.

Another option, which we may use for one or both of these films, is to splice the cut frames back onto the physical 35 mm print.  This too presents it's own challenges, namely trying to go through thousands of feet of film to find where each scene was cut, and then meticulously gluing the pieces together so as to not distort the image or the sound after it dries.  This option yields the best result, as the audio track is then re-united and nothing is lost.  I personally have never done this before, so I can not say how long this process would take.  Knowing in advance that there are frames cut makes this the more appealing choice.  The other two films kind of surprised us when we saw that there were parts missing.

The last option would be to just create a "deleted scenes" feature on the DVD and give menu access to each cut.  We would add the scenes that are long enough to be worth watching.  This would be by far the fastest solution, but it strays from the way we prefer to get it done.

Leave us some feedback with what you think we should do.  If it is apparently preferred that we just release what we have that would make it easier for us to decide.

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Print Quality

We checked the quality of our prints for two Eurospy films.

This post is to give you an overall update on two unreleased Ken Clark eurospy flicks, Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.

Rick watched them and said they are very fun films, but they are definitely different than the first 3 we have released. As many of you know, Ken Clark does not play an actual CIA agent in these films. He is actually a civilian, and the plots find him pulled into the action.

Rick sadly noted that there were a lot of cut scenes in both Tiffany Memorandum and the Fuller Report. Both will require extensive work to get the cut scenes back into the print and make sure the audio blends successfully. We have, as far as we currently know, all of the cut scenes for each film.

Our goal is to not have to re-insert all the cut scenes for these films though. We have narrowed down the search of labs who have negatives for these films. There is one in Paris and one in Madrid. The negatives were stored in one of those labs. There was a fire about a decade ago in the Paris lab. If these were included in the lost films, we may be in possession of the last prints for both of these films. If that is the case, we will be forced to go through the ardous task of editting back in the scenes that were removed.

When we learn for sure which lab have (or had) the negatives, we will let you know which path we need to take.

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